Shakespeare’s comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” takes place on Midsummer Night, the magical night of the summer solstice when anything can happen, including “A Dream”. The indefinite article refers to the dream, not to the night, which is not just any summer night but THE night before Midsummer’s Day (June 24 – with apologies to […]

Most people are probably familiar with the basics of tone languages, and Mandarin Chinese is the usual example. Briefly, such languages use pitch to contrast vowels (including diphthongs and triphthongs), in the same way that all languages use contrasting phonemes to contrast words. In fact the word “toneme” has been coined to describe this.

The Latin hodie, today, was an amalgamation of hoc (this) and die (day). The Italian oggi, the Spanish hoy, the Catalan avui and the Portuguese hoje are all direct descendants of hodie, via Vulgar Latin.

I came across the word picaflor in Javier Marias’ novel Corazón tan blanco. A rather lovely word which is apparently on the brink of extinction, un picaflor can refer to one of two things. The principal meaning is hummingbird, although this animal would today be more commonly referred to in Spanish as un colibrí, or […]

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.” I came across this characteristically gnomic utterance in an essay by Borges on French writer William Beckford’s Vathek (1782). For Borges, translation was both a primary literary act and a primary metaphor for the literary act: many of his best stories revolve around the notion of the translation, […]